Executive Summary

Mobile technology developments will not simply end with deployment of 3G networks. Need for improvement motivates further development. Large mobile revenues are fueling funding for that development. As a result, R&D for 4G is already under way. 4G networks promise to offer bandwidth that's comparable to that of landline networks, with mobility comparable to that of existing cellular services. This project focuses on the development of some of the core open-source software components for the 4G telecom infrastructure. The end result of this project would be a set of software artifacts, which would implement the standardized multimedia protocols defined by the telecommunication industry alliance 3GPP under the title "IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS)". This project is also expected to create significant momentum in Pakistan with respect to the early adoption and deployment of IMS. The expected outputs from this project are:

• To develop some core open-source, commercial grade, server and client software components specified by 3G under IMS.

• The final product will be highly scalable, fault tolerant and could deliver better or equal throughput than the commercial implementations available from different vendors.

• The components of this project will be able to execute and deliver carrier grade services on commercial off-the-shelf hardware machines i.e. no specialized hardware will be required to execute and run any of its components.

• The components will have the interfaces and APIs available to connect to other clients or servers in the IMS core, and can fit in a bigger framework.